MONDAY AM: Here’s the final tally for Johnny Depp’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End: it looted a 4-day holiday weekend booty of $142 million in North America, setting the record for both Memorial Weekends and holiday weekends. But Disney was also celebrating how Johnny Depp and the gang’s threequel logged the “biggest opening of all time” at the worldwide box office, $401 million from 29,000 screens, beating the current industry record of $382M set by Sony’s Spider-Man 3 earlier this month. (Using all its global box office since Wednesday, the studio is comparing its first six days with Spidey 3‘s first six days which started Tuesday May 1st but didn’t have the Monday holiday. Therefore, P3 is celebrating the first six days of global opening, not global opening weekend. Yeah, these records get that technical.) But today there’s consternation among Hollywood studios about Disney’s box office reporting from overseas for its At World’s End. The word “irregularities” is even being thrown around this growing controversy.

The $401 million figure included a six-day overseas tally of $245M for At World’s End which set a new international record surpassing the previous six-day high of $232M set by Spider-Man 3 a few weeks ago. This was the first of the Pirates series to debut day and date overseas. But domestically, the Jack Sparrow third romp lagged behind the Peter Parker third thriller: it’s interesting to note that P3‘s 4-day holiday weekend gross (Friday-Saturday-Sunday-Monday estimates) didn’t even beat SM3‘s 3-day weekend gross (Friday-Saturday-Sunday) — $142M to $151M. The Pirates threequel’s 3-day figure was $115M — well below last summer’s $134M opening 3-day weekend for its predecessor, Dead Man’s Chest. Including Thursday night’s gross receipts, P3 now has a domestic cume of $156M. (My earlier coverage of this Memorial Weekend box office May 25th-28th is here: U.S. Box Office: Pirate 3 Lagging Spidey 3 and Can Johnny Beat Spidey At Box Office?

This shows once again that Hollywood is depending heavily on foreign grosses to pump up box office. Internationally, Disney’s latest in the Pirates franchise shattered records from Russia to Japan with its $245 million cume through Monday (including Monday estimates). The film had record-breaking openings through Sunday in the following countries: Korea ($18.4 million), Japan ($15.9 million), Russia ($13.7 million), Spain ($11.6 million), Taiwan ($4.5 million) and Netherlands ($2.8 million). As for non-records, the U.K. ($26.6 million), France ($17.7 million), Germany ($16.8 million) and Australia ($9.9 million). P3 has markets yet to open including China and India.

As for other films, DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek the Third continues to badly trail Shrek 2 for domestic box office starting its second week out: 3-day weekend was $53M, 4-day holiday was $69M. Cume to date is $219.4M. For its 4th weekend in theaters, Sony’s Spider-Man 3 also slowed dramatically: 3-day weekend was $14M, 4-day holiday $18M. Cume to date is $307.6M. Here’s the Top 10 chart: